Diane Kendig

The form I use in these poems is not a traditional one, but one suggested by Susan Mitchell in the book The Practice of Poetry, where Mitchell suggests:

"Write an eighteen-line poem that uses diminishing, or nesting, rhyme. Order your eighteen lines into six three-line stanzas. Each stanza will take its end rhymes from a single word" (174).

Mitchell points out that the 17th century poet George Herbert used diminishing rhymes, which Mitchell has dubbed "nesting rhymes" after the nesting dolls. I prefer the term nesting also because sometimes I begin with the one syllable word and build to the larger rhyme rather than diminishing.

I spent a year working to draft about 10 poems in this form, sometimes diminishing, sometimes augmenting, sometimes combining both in a particular pattern. In addition to Mitchell's invention, I also worked to shape the poems by means of line lengths, another device used by 17th century poets. So, for example, "Two Nesting Poems" have wing shapes.

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Two Nesting Poems

Nesting

On Saturday, we chose to shunour front door. We sensed two birds’ tensionat the hanging South African Impatiens, as if they paid attention

to our porch from their perch next door on the suspensionwire. Our absence, like a missing monthly pensioncheck’s, left them anxious but free to shun

the more usual tree for the magenta blooms, there bestowingthe white pot with curly grasses, stowingthe stuff quickly, taking wing

noisily, that sudden stutter of their wingour cue. We asked the paperboy if he’d mind stowingthe daily at the end of the drive because we are bestowing

our stoop to them, and so our door,as ones with no impatience who would say, “Oh, we’d adoreit if you’d come to stay while, without us, you first-class stevedore,

and bring the wife and kids, just till the seven of you restoreyourselves ship-shape. If you prefer, stay, storethe fat and then ship out. Either/or.”

Winging It

Within ten hot July days without us, the porch plants expire.The Impatiens’ leaves and stems droop in a black spireat the hanging basket base, a funeral pyre,

and a certain sign we’ve erredto try in aviary ignorance to host this birdfamily. Except now four hatched heads have spurred

us on to proprietary notions again, a reconversion--really back to believing our earlier versionthat if we just shun

them....But now a week we peerin from our far outpost, the four fluffy heads appearhalf-dead, unfed, silent. No wonder: the parents disappear

for five days. We debate and waver on infanticide.Why did we ever let them build this sideof the house? Next time, I’d

sooner at the start just roust them out.Suddenly three fly. One, now spike-haired, stays as if to pout.The three return. The basket rocks. The four stream out in a whiffling spout.

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Diane Kendig, a poet, writer, and translator, is author of three chapbooks, most recently Greatest Hits, 1978-2000 (Pudding House). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in the journals Colere, Ekphrasis, Minnesota Review, Mid-America, U.S. 1 and Slant, among others, as well as the anthologies Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn and Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and their Working-Class Parents. A recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry, a Fulbright lectureship in translation, and a Yaddo Fellowship, she currently lives in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her website is at http://dianekendig.com/